{"id":5525,"date":"2016-04-07T08:15:26","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T12:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5525"},"modified":"2018-03-14T13:15:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:15:20","slug":"princeton-literary-inspirations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5525","title":{"rendered":"Princeton Literary Inspirations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Elvis,Yesterday, poet Ciaran Berry and novelist Nell Zink read from their work as part of a series of author presentations at Princeton University, open to the public (that\u2019s me!). On Friday, Man Booker Prize-winner and Ireland\u2019s \u201cfirst fiction laureate\u201d Anne Enright will read excerpts from her most recent novel, The Green Road.<\/em> I\u2019ll be there!<\/p>\n

The series of readings is conducted by the University\u2019s Lewis Center for the Arts, with Enright\u2019s presentation sponsored additionally by the Fund for Irish Studies. (Last year\u2019s fantastic presentation by Belfast author Glenn Patterson was under the Fund\u2019s aegis also.)<\/p>\n

Ciaran Berry<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Coincidentally, award-winning poet Ciaran Berry also is an Irish poet and grew up in County Galway and County Donegal. He now directs the creative writing program at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He doesn\u2019t have the full-out accent, though.<\/p>\n

Berry read several of his poems from various periods, including The Death of Elvis<\/a> and Liner Notes<\/a>. His particularly lovely poem For Shergar, Neither Ode nor Elegy<\/a>, is a tribute to the legendary race horse Shergar, kidnapped and killed by the IRA, and includes this: \u201cthe past tense entering its perfect form.\u201d It\u2019s one of those, \u201cwish I\u2019d thought of that\u201d lines.<\/p>\n

Nell Zink<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Nell Zink grew up in King George County, Virginia, but for many years has lived in Israel and Berlin, and has become a recent literary phenomenon in this country. She was introduced by faculty member Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex<\/em>, The Marriage Plot<\/em>) who said the classic \u201cNell\u201d and its assertive \u201cZink\u201d is \u201ca name just waiting to be famous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zink\u2019s debut novel was The Wallcreeper<\/em>, from which she read a passage about a married woman who plunges into an affair with a gas station attendant named Elvis\u2014acknowledging the nifty segue from Berry\u2019s poem. A New Yorker<\/em> profile of Zink by Kathryn Schulz<\/a> said The Wallcreeper<\/em> \u201csounds like nothing you have ever read, and derives its bang from ideas you hadn\u2019t thought to have.\u201d Smart, funny, insightful. Likely to come to a bad end. In this setting, it\u2019s hard to get a sense of the whole work, but the voice was terrific.<\/p>\n

Her second excerpt was from the more recent novel Mislaid<\/em>, a scene in which two gay men eating dinner in a crab restaurant make observations about other diners and themselves. The novel is notorious for its Caucasian main character Peggy, who reinvents herself and her white-blonde, blue-eyed daughter by claiming they are African Americans\u2014\u201ca high comedy of racial identity,\u201d Schulz says, and not easy to pull off. About such tectonic plot shifts in her books, Eugenides said, \u201cYou cannot call them plot twists, because that implies some underlying straightness.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, the subjects she takes up and the unflinching way she renders them make her, he said, \u201ca bull in the china shop of contemporary American fiction.\u201d More to read, more to read.
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